Why is having your own review site so important?

This is a question we’ve been asked many times; in fact, this question gets asked during almost every product demonstration that we do. The answer is simple; if your reviews are hosted on any other site but your own, they are not actually your reviews.

It may feel like the reviews written about your dealership and about your employees should be yours since after all, they are mentioning your staff members by name and thoroughly detailing their customer experiences at your place of business. In actuality, when a customer writes a Google review, or a review on Yelp! or any other reviews platform, the content ownership agreement is between the customer writing the review and the reviews platform hosting the review. Essentially, lifting the reviews off of another third-party reviews site is stealing and is a violation of copyright laws. Now, will the lawyers of Google soon be knocking at your door if you were to copy and paste a Google review and send it out in an email blast? Probably not. But the problem of content ownership regarding reviews doesn’t end there. What happens when you put in hours and hours of effort to get your customers to write a Google review, only to wake up one day and see that most of your reviews have been removed?

This has been the case, particularly with Google in recent months. Google is often quite vague about why reviews were removed and it often times is never addressed until an industry uproar calls for answers. However, an answer doesn’t replace the reviews or time and effort it took to get those reviews posted by legitimate customers. Because Google technically owns the content, a small business who has put it’s best foot forward doesn’t have any legs to stand on when it comes to recovering those displaced reviews. Remember the saying ‘don’t put all of your eggs in one basket’? The same applies here.

Presto Reviews encourages business to collect and gather reviews on all platforms. The reality is that between 60-70% of people who use search engines use Google. Google has become the phonebook of the internet and is now an important source for customer feedback about products and places of business. If you are looking for a reputation management strategy for your business, having a website that allows you to collect and own your customer reviews is a great step forward.

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What People Have to Say About Us

"Scott Falcone and his industry leadership at Presto Reviews has been an inspiration to myself and many others. He has developed an approach to customer reviews and the processes used by dealers to encourage and accumulate those reviews that I believe is the best in the auto industry. I highly recommend Scott from multiple perspectives, including sheer integrity and a thorough understanding of the automotive marketing space.”